How Close Can Indies Get To AAA Games?

@GarBenjamin

Oh I am fully aware of it, notice how a lot of them are action style RPG's more along the line of a Blizzard game? Some of them having crazy good looking artwork but the game is still somewhat simple.. Hence why I dumped on of my first projects which was going down that path.. They're everywhere , props on the MMORPG though even though graphically it looked one of the simplest it's probably one of the hardes to make..

Some of these games I do recognise and have a decent budget and plenty of staff behind them, although to the end user they couldn't care less.. Here's one I saw a while back which puts into perspective what you're up against..

Again don't worry about AAA, worry about indies..!

 

@ShadowK That does have very well done visuals. The thing is though honestly (and maybe I just look at games too much) but they all run together after awhile. And that is why I think about the non visual aspects more. Truly I think any of us could post some screenshots of a great Indie FPS or RPG game and most people wouldn't have a clue which game it actually was may even think it is one of the main AAA series.

Also they are not my competition. lol I am still just doing hobby stuff. And if / when I do release a game for sale it will be to a different market. People that like the kind of game I make. People that like to support Indies (again that is not the all encompassing definition I am talking about the large number of YouTubers and gamers who want to support Indies as in solo devs and super tiny teams).

 

Thanks! Pillars of Eternity was actually one of the games I looked at when trying to decide on a level of quality to aim for. It's nice to see my game being compared to such games.

I've been trying to balance making it look as good as I can and still perform well. I don't want it to run only on high end gaming systems. So far, it seems to be doing pretty well performance-wise.

I also have to balance working on graphics and working on gameplay. I'd love to spend days working on a single animation or creating a large variety of assets for the game, but if I am going to be solo, I have to do what I can.

I create all assets myself to maintain a consistent art style. The only things I've bought so far are shaders like the animated shader of the water (Aquas Lite, I think?), and the shader for highlighting models on mouse-over (Highlighting System, I believe). Anything else I buy will most likely be something that I can't do on my own. If I do a fog of war, I might have to buy that. I need to see if I can do a mini-map on my own. I need to get a good save-system going too.

I worked hard on graphics because I feel like I need to get people's attention. I am also going to do a very professional looking title screen art, which will also be used for promotional art or whantnot. My art background is founded on painting/illustration, so I hope to make use of that and do some art for my game (like Frank Frazetta or other artists).

 

If I could use my character "base" model which is about 2k tris, and the existing rig I built for it, then I could easy churn out some new characters. The animations would be the time-consuming part.

I have some Osprey books on Vikings. Persians and Italians, not so much (though I guess I could look up images on google)..

But anyway, I'm so busy at the moment with my game, I don't know what I'd ask in return or even what would be acceptable compensation.

 

Don't need animation, just model + texture. 2k poly base is fine (this is ballpark of the rest of what I'm working with).

Maybe I could provide you a good fog of war? I just spent a bunch of time on my FoW system, it's a little rigged for my specific needs, but I could rig it up for more of an RTS setup. It'd probably take me a day or two + a day or two of support I figure. So if you want to do a model exchange for that, might be a good trade.

FoW is kind of nice because it's kind of a stand alone piece, so I wouldn't have to know much about your project.

 

That sounds interesting. Do you have a picture? Feel free to discuss this in PM rather than here in the thread.

Also, how many characters would you need? If they are all similar, I can do quick variations. I have Substance Painter set up to quickly do variations, and my base character in Modo is designed to be easily modified assuming the characters won't be drastically different.. All the models in my game use 1 material. The more units that need unique equipment or physical outfit tweaks, the longer it will take.

 

Thanks @GarBenjamin for these video

I did my research before taking this challenge lol, I had seen the same things, I have also work on a similar game as a designer so I'm familiar with the wiggle room permitted. Also I'm a designer first, a lapse artist second and a coder last, I didn't took the bet blindly lol. I had chosen my genre carefully. But simple interaction don't mean less fun fun game, it's all about the balance of the design, I hope my inclination for action game will show through the battle system, once I design it.

Though I'm more interested in scope and production, for this challenge at least, and that's why I'm open to failure, I will learn whatever what. For some people these thread has been a waste of time, I personally has used them to see thing differently and perfected how I approach production which was the biggest problem on my current project, by troubleshooting this I see I can now realize my game with a clear path. I think that's something people underestimate. I mean nobody like producer in a team lol!

On progress, I still have other things to do appart this project, so I won't start code as early as I would like, I need to finish a document and I'm on the last part I need to focus.

For pointless report of progress on the challenge I have done that:

Spoiler: There is not really anything notable to see lol

https://www.dropbox.com/s/x8xs59kws3iq6ej/1 région scale.png?dl=1
Which is super pointless to show (early scale evaluation, 1 pixel = 2m², a square is 20m², medium square are 100m² and the groupe of 4 medium square is 200m², a square is basically the footprint of one typical rpg house with bed and living room). And I have also started to planned the grayboxing with making a list of common objects (table, chair, etc ..) to create proxy version for the grayboxing (they need to be to scale relative to the character). The hardest part is still to find world building justification for early decision (trinket to collect), I would have gone metroidvania like the 3d zelda game (genre I like and is super familiar with the design) I would be done already lol.

 

We seem to miss the fact there are a lot of Japanese / Chinese AAA developers a lot of us have never heard of as they tend to release for specific markets.. I noticed a lot of games you posted (especially in the top tens) weren't even in english.

Also IOS / Android is heavily restricted by storage capacity and technical limitations so you can't really make anything of massive scale. The fact a lot of these actually got it running on mobile is impressive within itself.. Finally for every successful PC based RPG project I've seen a thousand come undone before they get out the gate.

Yup, there's a fair bit of difference between doing as a hobby and asking for money.. Hobby games == no expectations..

 

I'm glad you guys appreciated those. Yes I come across these fairly often. I think these are actually Korean and Vietnamese developers. Some are surely Indies and they just seem to have a flair for making very AAA-like games (with the exceptions @ShadowK mentioned regarding depth and overall scope).

I suppose in some way it is like the Europeans in the 80s and early 90s. My brother and I used to be blown away at the differences between games produced by American companies and European companies on the C64 and Amiga.

The stuff from overseas was almost always very polished and the graphics had a sort of shine to them (for lack of a better term although that is how we described them at the time because they looked shiny in comparison like they had literally been polished to a shine physically lol) often lacking in the American company productions.

There is a lot of stuff out there. A LOT of stuff. And possibly some of the difference with these Korean and Vietnamese developers may come down to culture and even work life. Not sure just a guess there.

 

@neoshaman at least you're making progress. I'll check it out on lunch break. I almost worked on a world editor and ended up enjoying a bowl of ice cream instead. This week or weekend I will spend some thought on it. I need to do some more proofreading of in game text for another developer's game again tonight. lol

 

Unless you would rather keep it in PM - I'd actually rather publicly discuss (unless we get down to project specific details).

I really think it would be great if more people working on solo/small efforts consider trading skills, resources, etc.

You need to wear a ridiculous number of hats to produce a game solo, it would be great if the forum community could be a resource for taking some of the load off or asking questions of someone who is an expert with a hat you kind of suck at.

Here's a couple examples of the effect:

Spoiler

I'm still playing with different effects / colors. Right now I'm using tinting based on the ambient light which is important since I'm using dynamic day/night cycles.

So there's "explored" "visible" and "unexplored" layers.

I also have various shaders for fading characters in/out as they enter/leave fog.

If you want something more traditional that's also possible.

I'm currently using a full line of sight system, I don't think an RTS would want that much detail if you have tons of units.

 

Cool.

My characters are not using line of sight. I just set up a simple distance check. I did this because I need them to look in all directions, and there really aren't that many walls in the game to warrant a more realistic line of sight behavior, especially since I don't even know how many units will be on any given map (there's around 25 characters in just that last screenshot).

I would need something simple like in Age of Empires II. So, pretty much a "standard" fog of war where it has unexplored areas that are black, and explored but not currently visible which are a shade darker, and then the areas near characters where there is no visible fog at all.

Which sounds just like what you said.

Each player character needs to affect it, and the player tent should as well. This would need to extend out as far as their distance check for enemies goes.

I figure the lighting in my game will be set up differently than yours. I'm using 3 directional lights. One to light the scene and cast shadows. Another to light up the characters and scenery, and one to provide a little warm reflected light. I don't have very much ambient light, but maybe a tiny bit from the environment lighting, but it's very small.

Either way, as long as it looks good, I'll be happy. And as long as it has reasonable performance costs.

 

After I said all this about not PMing, I'll send you a PM tonight or tomorrow to figure out details - get your performance specs, etc

It'd be pretty cool if we made a trade. Might encourage that kind of thing to be a bit more common.

 

Cool, also let me know details of what kind of characters you need. The more specific the better so I don't have to redo anything.

I have a couple Osprey books on Vikings. So that would be a good place to start.

I'd like to get one character done so you can test and make sure it will work.

I also need to know if you plan on animating these, what kind of pose they need to be in, or anything else that may be relevant.

 

I have animation based on mecanim humanoid - so as long as their rigged - mecanim will map the animations against human skeleton.

Similar to the one sample character, I'll send you a FoW that's very close to what I am using (minimal changes) - then you can tell me what you like/dislike and we can go from there.

 

I use a fairly standard rig setup, but I've never tested it with Unity's mapping with mecanim. I'll see if I have a character that I no longer plan on using that you can test.

 

Cool. I think I can send you a test version of the FoW in a couple/few days - right now the LoS stuff is most of the processing. So I'll pull those bits out, tidy it up a little and send it over. Then we can figure out how you want to hide/show characters or buildings or whatever.

 

? There is little sense in commenting that you are in the wrong thread. Just go to the correct one and post.

 

I think they posted a post and then edited it to say "wrong thread" when they realised they posted in the wrong thread. Not sure why they didn't just use the delete button, but whatevs.

 

this entire thread is the wrong thread

 

Ah that could be. In that case understandable... carry on.

 

lol @neoshaman may well light the path. That reminds me I need to check that out. Completely forgot at lunch break.

 

But I have shakes thing up so that people start coming out of teh wood showing good works they were having, It's kind of a win

 

Yeah it is good because I think most of the people actually making such stuff rarely post and others probably don't even have accounts here.

In other news today I only glanced at your link saw dropbox and figured it was an exe. Just grabbed it looking forward to checking it out expecting it would be a very basic cube and capsule world and I found... an image.

For heavens sake man we've all seen enough screenshots and stuff. Let's get something actually running. And yes saying that I know I did the same thing. lol

 

I told you it was pointless ROFL , it's still important because it give scale, ie a region is big enough to have multiple city size settlement (by rpg standard) so there is a lot of density to fill and I must design accordingly.

Those groups of squares are foot prints, there is 6 that barely fill the space, right now I estimate it's likely to be an ideal footprint for a common "activity area", if I don't want the world to feel empty, overall you need 56 of these to "pack" the area, that's quite a number for one region only, there is 15 region, so there is 840 activity area possible, there is one settlement par zone and one shrine, so that's 30 mandatory activity area, good job 810 to go, there might be some impassable but that's still quite a number.

That's why number management is important and can kill project, which is where criticism of being unrealistic come from. If filling one footprint takes one days, that's 2 years and some of works just to fill the area. That's unrealistic, and that's just estimation, real number can be up or down. We need a solution! A design and planning solution!

That's planning stuff, it doesn't need to be fancy to be effective lol . Next time it will be runtime because I need to know speed and time of traversal. Also I was just testing new ways to use dropbox since the public link where closed, it was a test for me lol, I can share stuff now.

Also I made enough progress on the story in a way that informed the gameplay, so that's something done, most notably I was wondering (since I didn't start with a gameplay concept) what would be the role of the plot coupon in terms of play, I figure out that we collect "souls" from shrine that give you skills, that solve many problem at once, and it justify why you can materialize stuff from thin air, so now I have ideas for skills and all.

It inform the area's structure of each region in term of gameplay loop and the last boss (Now a shapeshifting Lich King, who is trying to enslave the people, because he can't exploit the richness of the land, he can't be out in the sun radiation, so he's influencing a cult to indoctrinate people). I have theming now basically.

 

I haven't downloaded this to check it out due to its size (1 GB and I almost always only download demos of 20 MB or less... prefer them to be 10 MB or less). But anyway... one of the newest games on GameJolt looks interesting as far as what I can make out of the design (goals). If you like depth and story you may want to check it out.

This is not AAA on graphics but it looks like it could end up a great Indie game. Maybe.

Right now it doesn't look to have much chance at all of being funded. But that's the challenge with something different. If the KS video opened with "Bravo Team...." showing a military dude walking and shooting or a civilian bad ass fighting a massive horde of zombies there would be more interest.

Alaska

It has good ratings so far (except for that one jackass who seems to put a 1 on every game they check out).

 

Just an add on, you PC police is taking skyrim (and witcher) as some paragon of scope and size, since I have console prize I raised you where my sight really is, I keep talking about skyrim because that's what you know but:

More diversity, of biomes, sub biomes, visual, verticality, character, move sets, vista, and 10 times the sizes ... skyrim is child play.

In these video they are using the mecha, but for 30h you are on foot, that gives an idea of the scale. You get the mecha roughly in the middle of the game length in critical path. And the game is super fun.

Also i my post above, I realized I could be more efficient by using footprint of 100m² (round number per region vs 200m²) which is 15² per region and 60² for the entire world and work on this as a quick prototype. I would spawn per pixel per foot print entire "context" made of one environment (forest, path, water, etc ...) and one activity (aka fighting, mining, town, etc ...).

In fact that's maybe the strategy use with early buildiing of the game like xenoblade who are massive:

When the character walk through the bridge, it's big but fit a tile grid in width. we can infer the level design methodology laying out the grid.

There is also of very well hidden copy paste all the way around, while having distinct landmark and topology. Masterpiece in production.

 

I just tried Escape from Tarkov, its darn close to Triple A. They need to fix perfomance though, I'm on a 1800x Ryzen and 1080 TI and I get framedrops

 

I just read the OP and it does a great job defining things. Indie means a team from 1 to 5 people (a large range there but still at least it caps it at a small number) plus an additional 0 to 3 part-time contractors (again a pretty massive range considering this is now 1 person involved or 8 people involved).

And the only thing that seems to be the focus is the graphics. They also list the names of 4 AAA games to define the target.

Probably this all was iteratively added but anyway it is pretty well-defined now. I think number of people has way too much variance but for this discussion is workable. Basically just look at it like can a team of 5 people plus another 3 contractors produce such games.

 

@neoshaman looks like an interesting game. I don't care so much about the massive size of the game world though. I mean sure it is cool from a technical view. It could be a disaster from a gameplay side though. But they seem to have balanced it out by making world many times larger than other games and granting skills / vehicle that boost movement speed by many times as well. So in the end seems basically the same general experience in some sense.

I'll check into this game more when I have time. But I'm focused more on like a 2x2 square mile area or possibly even a 1 x 1. At least for now. Tonight I will knock out that simple world editor. Then need some more content.

Something to think about... if you are the size of an ant a game world the size of an average house in the city front lawn is huge.

 

My opinion, the good ones are:

SAELIG (one guy production with very good steam user rating)
Life is Feudal (more guys, looks good, but has mixed rating, players don't care about that not a big company is behind the scene...)

Both are not AAA, but looks like they could have success. The asian games looks very similar to each other for me, I dont belive that they are targeted for the EU market. They hurt my eyes... You don't need AAA to make a good game, but you can have it. In case of AAA, you will need FaceFX 800$-900$ and more expensive software, like SP, SD.
Unity as engine is very powerful in combination with the unity asset store.

 

Those games are phenomenal, you have to play i to believe it, the prequel on wii is equally phenomenal, I have spend 20h STRAIGHT just on the second map of the first game, that's how engaging it is. It's not about about skill though, they have engaging enemy, and the scale my god, that how you do it, the game is beautiful just as a walking simulator, everyplace is a sight to behold and it add to the encounter greatly to stumble on things that are loosely hidden, if you want to feel what exploration feel like, just play those game. I'm serious. There is no waay I match that in any shape or form lol.

 

It sounds really cool. I do like the idea of a large scale but not really as a walking simulator unless the world is incredibly interesting. Which to me is not something that looks close to what I can find looking out my front door or taking a little road trip. If it is maybe alien, bizarre, etc that would get my attention more.

And now I am off to search for that Xenoblade Chronicles (I like the name) and learn more about it. I think my development is done for today. Just depends. Never know I may grab a beer later and think ah what the heck and do the second iteration.

 

I wouldn't go that far. In fact for me personally it got kinda boring sometimes, especially when you're rebuilding the city and they pile those petty little quests on you like a mountain of pennies. I may be misremembering, but I seem to recall most of them being fetch quests.

Playing X now, and while it's enjoyable, it's not something out of this world. The combat system is interesting, but honestly as an amalgamation of action and turn-based systems it has the weaknesses of both (unable to plan out your actions and then play them out, unable to directly control your character inbattle) and the strengths of neither.

It's a good game, a really good game, but it's far from the best game I've played.

Edit: This seems to have become our catch-all thread for talking about what we're doing, I've noticed. Or is it only within the scope of stuff that's trying to emulate AAA on a smaller scale?

 

You're right and I need to stop doing that. I'll edit my last post right after this.

I think what happened is that just talking about game dev and looking at screenshots and videos of AAA-like games just gets old after a while. I mean they look really great but sooner or later a person wants to actually be doing something. And yet all of us in our own way our projects have some connection or inspiration from AAA even if it is like me where the inspiration is to go the opposite way visually and so forth.

 

I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing, just making an observation.

 

I guess a lot of people have these issues, but I couldn't ask for more, in fact I just go and get them all I can then just spend time exploring the world and stumbling on them. I didn't care much about the story or playing it like over rpg, I was there for the world exploration, like going to place I'm not suppose to and fighting over leveled monster.

But I'm really in for the exploration, the nooks and cranny and small details are amazing, the world is fantastic by itself, each enemy has its own behavior and pattern.

I would like to hear more about it, so far I have been able to do everything I could and fight monster way above my level. The game tend to play itself if you aren't paying attention but option are there to be abused:
- placement is important, different technique have different effect base on where you are relative to the enemy,
- melee and ranged have different cool down so switching between them is key to do max damage.
- targeting weaknesses allow you to prevent certain attack or expose weaknesses, which allow you to control what's happening,
- you can give order to character, especially to conserve those precious TP needed for overleveled monster
- Status effect matter a lot, inflicting status effect is a rather important part, which ties to all system above (placement, range, weaknesses, order)
- Character have joint actions for max damage, it's customizable to get the max effect
- leveling skills allow for better opportunity, especially in comboing compatible skills (like stagger then use a technique that does max damage on staggered enemy)
- there is swapable class with each their own skills progression, and maxing a class unlocks new class
- Party member matter,choose who you go out with carefully
- you need to level shops, access to good weapon is key to balance overleveled fight
- The skell (mecha) had another layer because going in and out of it has some startegic layer.
- let's not talk about the economy with mining facility,I haven't get it yet lol

So yeah, the game is playable without engaging in its complexity, but if you go simply for the quest and not engaging with the monster and exploration, I guess that's not too thrilling, because the game really don't explain itself at all, unless you start looking at menu and all.

 

You can't watch these video and say that lol

 

No that world looks cool and from what I read the first game came out 7 years ago (in Japan) and unless I misread this massive game it was actually on the Wii and then ported later to the 3DS. So these "lil consoles" actually have a game with a world far bigger than any on the "big" consoles or desktop pcs. That is pretty nuts. lol

EDIT: @neoshaman Well graphically some of it is pretty boring and plain. We've seen so many games now going for the realistic visual style and so it often looks like yeah there is a cool looking spaceship that I have seen a thousand times before. I am sure it was created from scratch but I mean I've seen so many of them now going for this realistic sort of style that one may as well be another. And the terrain... rocks, grass yes it looks quite like a photograph or video and quite like what I've seen countless times before in AAA games since the days of the original crysis (or before).

To me this sort of realistic style they almost always go for just gets boring after awhile (simply through repetition of having seen AAA go after that visual style so often). BUT I can separate the graphics from the gameplay and the game itself looks kind of unique. The world design (population wise) seems pretty interesting too. And oddly they seem to use different graphics styles in different parts of the game. Some seem to be going for hyper realistic visuals and other areas are using more of a stylistic approach.

 

I'm aware of all that (or most, I haven't gotten anywhere near mechs yet). I play the dual daggers/machine guns class (the final one) at the moment (I change whenever I level to the max), and always attack from the rear except when using a special ability (such as shadowstrike) which is stronger on the side. Make sure to use the appropriate colored skill when one of my teammates gives the appropriately colored bark. Press "B" when it appears. Target monster legs and such before any general attacks. Level skills (only a little bit, since I change when the class is leveled), level the corps with Miranium or whatever. Usually don't order teammates around unless I'm taking on an enemy I've had trouble with and think I'll die to.

I typically fight enemies about 5 levels above myself. I've found that outside of that range my teammates pretty much die on the first enemy attack, leaving me to fend for myself (and of course I die because I've got all the aggro).

"Plan out" was poorly worded, you can do that with any game - what I mean was, with a turn-based system where combat is paused, you can look at the combat for as long as you like, and then determine what's your best move. You can't really do that with this (or any real-time non-pause) game - you can plan beforehand, but you can't stop in the middle to assess the current situation and consider the benefits of taking a different approach.

 

Hi,

missed this comment, thanks! No videos yet. I'am working on small parts, yet on the bullet impact animator manager in combination with my pool manager. I have to make at first such missing basic features, then I will combine them all together. The problem is at the time, that some of the older features are not working anymore correctly. This happens through changes in the Unity layer management, or Unity update (minimap is gone...), or because of other enhancements. But maybe I will make some feature videos in some weeks/months.

 

...then you are a wizard because there's only 24 hours in a day ;[

 

Procedural generation is saving vidya.

 

You guys make it sound so easy,if anyone wants to proceduraly generate a pretty large outdoor scene for our game please contact me

 

What level design needs do you have? If it's just generating a heightmap TerrainComposer is more than capable of that.

Edit: And it's capable of much more too. You can generate trees and grass and splats based on terrain detail, place objects based on terrain detail (such as slope or height) or splats themselves...procedural tools seem really powerful.

 

A heightmap generator could be easily knocked out. Just grab some random values and define some rules (what I call controlled randomness) plot some high points (brighter spots) and smooth everything. Obviously it could all be made more complex with digging channels and holes for water and so forth.

Heck I am sure there are already many algorithms out there to do this in different ways. I suppose one could run a simulation of weather effects and plate shifting over millions of years but that's probably best left for academic endeavors (results of all of their play-time research experiments might be out there as open source though).

 

Shoutout to @sfbaystudios, he's already doing what you propose.

Looks very promising. Good luck with your project!

Sounds like you and @frosted would be a perfect match to just trade your skills "time for time". I've always thought that in theory that kind of collab between primarily an artist and primarily a coder would make a lot of sense, and everyone still fully owns their project in every way, avoiding all the nasty pitfalls of collaborating with others.

I haven't read the rest of the thread, so you might be already working out something, but I just wanted to mention it.

I'll check out some of your videos on youtube. I'm curious to see how you did your terrain.

 

@Martin_H @Billy4184

Long thread so I didn't read it all, but yes, I agree with Billy that making art assets easily modifiable in the engine makes them a billion times more valuable. I really wish more asset store artists were doing it -- it's not terribly difficult to add mesh morphing, and I'd be way more than willing to let other artists use my scripts to drive their morphs. Same with substances -- using Substance Designer it's not terribly difficult to make textures customizable.

It'd be great if more people picked those things up

 

I'd like to see a software that could do a decent job of retexturing, and possibly morphing, any asset (or at least a significant portion of them) - because that would bring in all the assets already out there. But in the meantime I'm a fan of your approach to creating art, and would like to see more of this approach. In my meager collection of art assets that I sell on the store, I try to at a minimum add sliders for colors and wear and tear, but there's definitely a lot more that substance designer enables you to expose.

 

Seems like a perfect time to pimp Archimatix, a node-based modeler.